All of these methods you listed strike me as limiting in they emphasize equal voting - often I don't believe everyone deserves an equal vote. Heretical perhaps, but I'd much rather let a small number of people who will be held accountable for the final design entirely drive these explorations. It's their necks on the line. They should at least win or lose on their own intuitions.
Having people vote on one sentence, or one sketch, descriptions of ideas is always a crap-shoot: people are heavily biased to the ideas they're familiar with, and they can't be equally familiar with all the ideas. With a pile of 50 ideas and only time to explore 5, I'd sit down with the three or four people most accountable for the final result and talk it out. I would depend on intuition, debate and persuasion more than any sort of numerical/polling/ranking system. If I did anything "methody", which I'd try to avoid, I do one of two things: 1) Have a list of criteria, or project goals, or desirable attributes up on the whiteboard during that discussion to help us frame our opinions. 2) Make the goal to pick one high risk idea, three medium risk ideas, and one low risk idea. This frames the problem of picking alternatives as a risk portfolio, where our goal is to distribute the creative risks in some way. This makes it ok to advocate a crazy idea, since that's desirable to fit the high risk slot. But most importantly, if I didn't have the power to grant this much authority to those 3 people, my real problem is political, not the quest for the perfect number of alternatives. -Scott Scott Berkun www.scottberkun.com -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Chauncey Wilson Sent: Monday, January 19, 2009 10:26 AM To: christine chastain Cc: Dave Malouf; [email protected] Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] How many alternatives, concepts,or sketches are enough? I would be curious to hear what tools colleagues do use for prioritization of ideas. The key issue here is what the criteria are for choosing ideas. In the early stages of ideation, the criteria might be different for choosing what to consider further (the 10 ideas out of 300) versus what to consider when you move into detailed design. Some general methods for prioritization are: 1. The monetary method where a sample of people are given a fixed amount of "money", a list of ideas or requirements along with their relative costs and then asked to "buy" the things of most value. 2. The criterion matrix where you list the criteria (weighted or unweighted) and then calculate a score with the top scores meeting more of the criteria. 3. Q-sorting where you ask people to sort on an important criteria on a scale ranging from low to high. 4. Private voting for the best ideas 5. Public voting for the best ideas (red dots on the best ideas) 6. Consensus 7. Decision by a leader 8. Decision by another group 9. The target method (good for a first cut between good and not-good idea) ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
